Lies and Other Tall Tales

What's the shortest man you ever seen?

I seen a man so short he had to get up on a box to look over a grain of sand.

And the fastest?

I seen a man run so hard that he lost his feets.

Back in the day, there were liars who could lie so good, you didn't even want to know the truth. And we have Zora Neale Hurston to thank for collecting their stories. In Lies and Other Tall Tales, Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Honor artist Christopher Myers has created a visual treat that will tickle your funny bone. Myers's expressive collages are as bold and wild as the whoppers Hurston encountered on her travels through the Gulf States.

Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. An author of four novels (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948); two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She attended Howard University, Barnard College and Columbia University, and was a graduate of Barnard College in 1927. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida. She died in Fort Pierce, in 1960.  In 1973, Alice Walker had a headstone placed at her gravesite with this epitaph: “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”